The Anti-American Worker Republican Origins of Michigan’s Right-To-Work Law

The Anti-American Worker Republican Origins of Michigan’s Right-To-Work Law

As police held back thousands of protesters near the state capital building, Michigan, the birthplace of the modern labor movement, became the 24th state to enact so-called “right-to-work” legislation. Earlier today, Governor Rick Snyder signed two bills preventing public and private sector unions from requiring workers to pay union fees.

The Detroit News reports that after requests from Grover Norquist and others, Snyder switched sides on the issue. United Auto Workers President Robert King said in an interview, that the Koch brothers and Amway owner Dick DeVos “bullied and bought their way to get this legislation in Michigan.”

In an editorial headlined “Drinking the Kochs’ Kool Aid,” the Detroit Free Press was unable to account for the governor’s change of heart, but offered some theories on the motivations of State Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville. He may have been under pressure, the newspaper said, from the anti-union Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), both financially supported by the Koch brothers. ALEC’s model right-to-work bill “mirrors the Michigan law word for word.”

    Word is the groups threatened Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville’s leadership post, and promised him a primary challenge in 2014, if he refused to move right-to-work forward.

    But none of this explains why the seemingly pragmatic Snyder would hitch his wagon to an organization that has already demonstrated more interest in its own ideological objectives than in Snyder’s priorities. What have the [American Legislative Exchange Council] ALEC’s sponsors done for Michigan, and how did a governor who seemed dedicated to the middle path …end up in bed with them?

(Although it isn’t known how many Michigan state legislators are members of ALEC, the Detroit Free Press reports that at least one of the lawmakers who introduced the bill has been associated with ALEC.)

Some have speculated that the governor’s decision was born out of frustration with the UAW, which earlier this year pushed through a ballot initiative to write collective bargaining rights into the state constitution. The proposition was voted down in November by a margin of 58 to 42 percent. Greg McNeilly, who runs Michigan Freedom Fund, a PAC that supports the right-to-work law, told The Washington Post that the measure’s failure emboldened Republicans.

    “Bob King put this on the agenda,” McNeilly said, referencing the UAW president. “He threatened this state. He tried to bully and intimidate the state with this disastrous proposal that was so bad a majority of his members didn’t even back it. The whole state had a conversation. They lost.”

Last week, the governor and the state’s House and Senate majority leaders suddenly moved on the legislation, announcing their plans in a group press conference in which they said the issue is about fairness: workers should have a choice.

In fact, workers already do have a choice. Federal law guarantees that they can’t be forced to join unions, that they can’t be made to pay dues or fees to causes they don’t support. A worker hired today in a Michigan union shop already can refuse membership and pay only a fraction of a union member’s dues to cover the cost of workplace bargaining. The new law — aimed at weakening unions even further — effectively puts organized labor into a position where workers can pay nothing and still receive the benefit of collective bargaining.

As President Obama noted on Monday, “These so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws, they don’t have to do with economics, they have everything to do with politics. What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money.” Research backs the president up. Last year, the Economic Policy Institute released a report estimating that right-to-work laws decreased hourly wages for all workers by 3 percent. When businesses make a profit, the beneficiaries are typically CEOs and owners, not workers.

The conservative movement has always held the average American worker in contempt. The think that businesses should be run much like prison road gangs with workers as servants who shut up and do what they are told. Republicans hate the idea of workers having any rights, a legacy of the white male voters of red states. hearing Republicans talk about freedom is always good for a laugh - its jingoism - they mean the freedom to trample over Americans like they just so much trash. That is not freedom, that is the way the totalitarian monarchs of Medieval Europe thought about the serfs. Michigan Adopts the ALEC Model for Diminishing Democracy

Rupert Murdoch's Anti-American Fox News Uses Falsehood-Based Poll Questions To Back Up Its Phony Benghazi Scandal

Mitt Romney's Favorite Coal Company Forces Workers To Donate to Radical Anti-American Conservatives

Mitt Romney's Favorite Coal Company Forces Workers To Donate to Radical Anti-American Conservatives

“You’ve got a great boss,” Mitt Romney proclaimed to a crowd of coal miners at a campaign rally in August.

He was referring to Robert Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, one of the largest coal mining operators in the country.

For Romney, that statement was particularly true. According to accounts from multiple coal miners, employees were forced to attend the event without pay. “Just for the record, if we did not go, we knew what would happen,” said one miner in a letter to a local radio station. Weeks later, Romney’s campaign featured images of the coal miners in a pro-coal ad. (The Obama campaign hit back this week with an ad claiming Romney used coal workers as “props”).

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. An expose from New Republic Senior Editor Alec MacGillis shows that Murray Energy is doing far more than requiring employees to spend uncompensated time at campaign events — the company is actually requiring them to donate to GOP candidates like Romney:

    The accounts of two sources who have worked in managerial positions at the firm, and a review of letters and memos to Murray employees, suggest that coercion may also explain Murray staffers’ financial support for Romney. Murray, it turns out, has for years pressured salaried employees to give to the Murray Energy political action committee (PAC) and to Republican candidates chosen by the company. Internal documents show that company officials track who is and is not giving. The sources say that those who do not give are at risk of being demoted or missing out on bonuses, claims Murray denies.

    The Murray sources, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, came forward separately. But they painted similar pictures of the fund-raising operation. “There’s a lot of coercion,” says one of them. “I just wanted to work, but you feel this constant pressure that, if you don’t contribute, your job’s at stake. You’re compelled to do this whether you want to or not.” Says the second: “They will give you a call if you’re not giving. .?.?. It’s expected you give Mr. Murray what he asks for.”

This spring, Murray organized a fundraiser for Mitt Romney, eventually bundling more than a million and half dollars for the candidate. According to the New Republic, employees of Murray Energy have donated more than $1.4 million to Republican candidates — with $120,000 raised for Romney this campaign season alone.

While employees say Murray does not explicitly force them to make donations, he makes it very clear what could happen if they don’t contribute some of their salary to Republicans. “We have been insulted by every salaried employee who does not support our efforts,” he wrote in one 2012 letter obtained by the New Republic.

And in a 2011 letter to company managers, Murray alluded to potential consequences if employees did not donate: “Please see that our salaried employees ‘step up,’ for their own sakes and those of their employees.”

Republicans have always viewed the American worker as a sheep that is here to do its bidding be be grateful. They do not have the view of real Americans that a good business model is a partnership between labor and management. Some may remember that Murray hates regulations - so much so they were and still are willing to sacrifice the lives of workers to squeeze every last dollar they can out of the work of miners - regardless of the deadly consequences.

Mitt Romney Misled the Middle Class About his Tax Plan

Republicans are pro free market right? Revealed: Romney’s Bain Capital Invested in Grotesque Chinese Sweatshop, Detailed at Boca Raton Fundraiser

Republicans like to paint Romney as an entrepreneur whose activities at Bain Capital have benefited Americans. In a campaign full of whoppers, that’s one of the biggest lies of all. Economist Paul Davidson recently pointed out the truth on AlterNet [3]: “Romney has spent his career offshoring and outsourcing American production processes -- and associated jobs -- to countries like China where human labor is valued in the market at a very low wage rate.” The sub-human conditions at these production facilities represent things that Americans are strongly opposed to: child abuse, squalor, forced overtime, and peanuts for pay.

Romney’s penchant for bragging about his business activities at fundraisers helps underscore just how vile his brand of capitalism really is. While CEO of Bain, Romney invested in a Chinese sweatshop which he appears to be describing in detail [4] at the very same Boca Raton fundraising event where he made his infamous case that nearly half of all Americans are freeloaders.

A report recently released by the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights reveals that while Romney was deeply invested at a firm called Global-Tech, low pay and horrific conditions were status quo at its Chinese appliance factory.

Was Romney aware? Let’s take a look at the presidential hopeful's own words:

    “When I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there. It employed about 20,000 people. And they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23. They were saving for potentially becoming married. And they work in these huge factories, they made various uh, small appliances. And uh, as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with uh, with little bathrooms at the end of maybe 10, 10 room, rooms. And the rooms they have 12 girls per room. Three bunk beds on top of each other. You've seen, you've seen them? (Oh…yeah, yeah!) And, and, and around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire and guard towers. And, and, we said gosh! I can't believe that you, you know, keep these girls in! They said, no, no, no. This is to keep other people from coming in. Because people want so badly to come work in this factory that we have to keep them out.”

Charles Kermaghan, director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, asks: “Does Mr. Romney seriously believe that young men and women in China are racing to climb over fortress-like walls topped with barbed wire, just to get a poorly paid job at Global-Tech? Or is it possible that the barbed wire and armed guards are meant to lock the Chinese workers in and strip them of their legal rights?”

Like everything else Republicans believe in, when you get down to the details, it is a sick twisted view of what normal patriotic Americans believe in.

It Looks as Though Conservative Republican Sheriff Joe Arpaio Got His Law Enforcement Training From an al Qaeda Manual

It Looks as Though Conservative Republican Sheriff Joe Arpaio Got His Law Enforcement Training From an al Qaeda Manual

Earlier today, the Department of Justice filed a formal legal complaint against Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) alleging widespread constitutional violations and lawless mistreatment of Latinos. According to the complaint, Arpaio and his staff engaged in widespread, violent and demeaning mistreatment of Latino residents of Maricopa County, often targeting individuals solely because of their race:

    Forcing Women To Sleep In Their Own Menstrual Blood: In Arpaio’s jails, “female Latina LEP prisoners have been denied basic sanitary items. In some instances, female Latina LEP prisoners have been forced to remain with sheets or pants soiled from menstruation because of MCSO’s failure to ensure that detention officers provide language assistance in such circumstances.”
    Assaulting Pregnant Women: “[A]n MCSO officer stopped a Latina woman – a citizen of the United States and five months pregnant at the time – as she pulled into her driveway. After she exited her car, the officer then insisted that she sit on the hood of the car. When she refused, the officer grabbed her arms, pulled them behind her back, and slammed her, stomach first, into the vehicle three times. He then dragged her to the patrol car and shoved her into the backseat. He left her in the patrol car for approximately 30 minutes without air conditioning. The MCSO officer ultimately issued a citation for failure to provide identification.”
    Stalking Latina Women: “In another instance, during a crime suppression operation, two MCSO officers followed a Latina woman, a citizen of the United States, for a quarter of a mile to her home. The officers did not turn on their emergency lights, but insisted that the woman remain in her car when she attempted to exit the car and enter her home. The officers’ stated reasons for approaching the woman was a non-functioning license plate light. When the woman attempted to enter her home, the officers used force to take her to the ground, kneed her in the back, and handcuffed her. The woman was then taken to an MCSO substation, cited for ‘disorderly conduct,’ and returned home. The disorderly conduct citation was subsequently dismissed.”
    Criminalizing Being A Latino: “During raids, [Arpaio's Criminal Enforcement Squad] typically seizes all Latinos present, whether they are listed on the warrant or not. For example, in one raid CES had a search warrant for 67 people, yet 109 people were detained. Fifty-nine people were arrested and 50 held for several hours before they were released. Those detained, but not on the warrant, were seized because they were Latino and present at the time of the raid. No legal justification existed for their detention.”
    Criminalizing Living Next To The Wrong People: “[D]uring a raid of a house suspected of containing human smugglers and their victims . . . officers went to an adjacent house, which was occupied by a Latino family. The officers entered the adjacent house and searched it, without a warrant and without the residents’ knowing consent. Although they found no evidence of criminal activity, after the search was over, the officers zip-tied the residents, a Latino man, a legal permanent resident of the United States, and his 12-year-old Latino son, a citizen of the United States, and required them to sit on the sidewalk for more than one hour, along with approximately 10 persons who had been seized from the target house, before being released.”
    Ignoring Rape: Because of Arpaio’s obsessive focus on “low-level immigration offenses” his officers failed “to adequately respond to reports of sexual violence, including allegations of rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse of girls.”
    Widespread Use Of Racial Slurs: “MCSO personnel responsible for prisoners held in MCSO jails routinely direct racial slurs toward Latino prisoners, including calling Latino prisoners ‘paisas,’ ‘wetbacks,’ ‘Mexican bitches,’ ‘fucking Mexicans,’ and ‘stupid Mexicans.’”
    Widespread Racial Profiling: “[I]n the southwest portion of the County, the study found that Latino drivers are almost four times more likely to be stopped by MCSO officers than non-Latino drivers engaged in similar conduct. . . . In the northwest portion of the County, the study found that Latino drivers are over seven times more likely to be stopped by MCSO officers than non-Latino drivers engaged in similar conduct. . . . Most strikingly, in the northeast portion of the County, the study found that Latino drivers are nearly nine times more likely to be stopped by MCSO officers than non-Latino drivers engaged in similar conduct.”
    Random, Unlawful Detention Of Latinos: “MCSO officers stopped a car carrying four Latino men, although the car was not violating any traffic laws. The MCSO officers ordered the men out of the car, zip-tied them, and made them sit on the curb for an hour before releasing all of them. The only reason given for the stop was that the men’s car ‘was a little low,’ which is not a criminal or traffic violation.”
    Group Punishments For Latinos: “In some instances, when a Latino [Low English Proficiency] prisoner has been unable to understand commands given in English, MCSO detention officers have put an entire area of the jail in lockdown—effectively preventing all the prisoners in that area from accessing a number of privileges because of the Latino LEP prisoner’s inability to understand English, inciting hostility toward the LEP prisoner, and potentially placing MCSO officers and other prisoners in harm’s way.”

Has anyone seen Sheriff Joe Arpaio's birth certificate. He does not just act like a terrorist, he is a terrorist.

President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights Bill Donohue: "Nature Has Ordained" That Only Men And Women "Can Have A Family. Gay People Have Been Disqualified From Nature". Who is it exactly that appointed this conservative Republican moron to demi-god who gets to determine who is human and who is not.

Foreign interloper Rupert Murdoch owns the anti-American propaganda channel called Fox News. Steve Doocy, one of the dumbest most anti-American talking heads for Murdoch recently made this ridiculous claim, Fox's Doocy Tries To Blame Obama For JP Morgan Losses: "If He's The President, He's The President Of The Banks, Too". The President of the USA regardless of party does not run or over see the day to day operations of banks, regardless of political party. Doocy should read a newspaper not run by Anti-American propagandist like Murdoch once in a while. Even JP Morgan admits they are the ones who screwed up, JPMorgan’s Dimon: Firm suffered $2B trading loss after ‘egregious’ failure’

JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said the firm suffered a $2 billion trading loss after an “egregious” failure in a unit managing risks, jeopardizing Wall Street banks’ efforts to loosen a federal ban on bets with their own money.

When Did Conservatives Exploit Terrorist Deaths For Partisan Political Gain

When Did Conservatives Exploit Terrorist Deaths For Partisan Political Gain

Perusing the political media these days you can't help but notice the hand-wringing consensus that the Obama administration is running a risk by "politicizing" the death of Osama bin Laden. Foreign policy achievements, we're told, are somehow sacrosanct and shouldn't be sullied by the taint of electioneering.

The president, according to McClatchy, is in "a roiling dispute between his re-election campaign and Republicans, who accuse Obama of politicizing a unifying event by taking credit for ordering the raid that got bin Laden." The ever-eager Fox News reports that "President Obama faced mounting criticism Tuesday for allegedly politicizing the anniversary of Usama bin Laden's death, with Sen. John McCain scolding the commander-in-chief and former New York Gov. George Pataki going so far as to call on Obama to apologize."

It would be nice if the press, when wrestling with this narrative, could dive deep into their memories and travel all the way back to June 2006, when the government of Iraq announced that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, had been killed in an airstrike. The Bush White House and the Republican Congressional majority, facing terrible poll numbers and an angry electorate, were ecstatic at the news that one of the world's most wanted terrorists had met his end at American hands and immediately set to work politicizing his death.

The New York Times reported on June 13, 2006:

    It came as Republicans began a new effort to use last week's events to turn the war to their political advantage after months of anxiety, and to sharpen attacks against Democrats. On Monday night, the president's top political strategist, Karl Rove, told supporters in New Hampshire that if the Democrats had their way, Iraq would fall to terrorists and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would not have been killed.

    "When it gets tough, and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party's old pattern of cutting and running," Mr. Rove said at a state Republican Party gathering in Manchester.

Rove (who is now busily and dishonestly trying to diminish the Bin Laden raid) was delivering a message that synced nicely with the House Republican strategy (elucidated in a confidential memo prepared by John Boehner) to use Zarqawi's death to draw "a portrait of contrasts between Republicans and Democrats with regard to one of the most important political issues of our era."

Per the memo:

    As a result of our efforts during this debate, Americans will recognize that on the issue of national security, they have a clear choice between a Republican Party aware of the stakes and dedicated to victory, versus a Democrat Party without a coherent national security policy that sheepishly dismisses the challenges America faces in a post- 9/11 world.

Of course, even if there were no high-profile example of Republicans "spiking the football" over the death of a terrorist, are we really to believe they wouldn't have done exactly that had he been killed under Bush's watch?

So please: before we lend credence to all the pearl-clutching bluster over "politicizing" the death of a terrorist, let's pay due respect to recent history and common sense.

Conservatives lied us into Iraq as a way to promote the conservative movement. They lied about connections between Iraq and Bin Laden. Conservatives exploited terrorism at the 2004 RNC conventions - as this video clearly shows. Conservatives have no shame and no honor when it comes to doing whatever they can to unjustly promote themselves, lie to the American people and trash the economy in their spare time. Conservatives are the enemy within. Everyday doing whatever they can to make America and Democracy weaker.

Romney Wrote NYT Op-Ed Entitled "Let Detroit go bankrupt." Now Claims Auto Industry Reorganization by Government Was His Idea

John McCain still whining about 'politicizing' Mitt Romney's opposition to bin Laden raid strategy. Of course McCain's personal war experiences were awful, yet he has exploited them for political gain at every opportunity.

Paul Ryan(R-WI) has a pleasant personality - that does not mean he should get away with being a fanatic. One who would gut Medicare and increase the deficit.


Michelle Malkin hates women. Hates equal pay for women who do the same work as men. Hates that women should not be discriminated against for health insurance. Malkin basically hates every democratic ideal America stands for.

How Conservatism, Lobbyist and Money Are Destroying Democracy

How Conservatism, Lobbyist and Money Are Destroying Democracy

Florida’s now-infamous Stand Your Ground law, which lets you shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution, sounds crazy — and it is. And it’s tempting to dismiss this law as the work of ignorant yahoos. But similar laws have been pushed across the nation, not by ignorant yahoos but by big corporations.

Specifically, language virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged). And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy.

What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law.

Many ALEC-drafted bills pursue standard conservative goals: union-busting, undermining environmental protection, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatization — that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations. And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization.

What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.

And in case you were wondering, no, the kind of privatization ALEC promotes isn’t in the public interest; instead of success stories, what we’re getting is a series of scandals. Private charter schools, for example, appear to deliver a lot of profits but little in the way of educational achievement.

But where does the encouragement of vigilante (in)justice fit into this picture? In part it’s the same old story — the long-standing exploitation of public fears, especially those associated with racial tension, to promote a pro-corporate, pro-wealthy agenda. It’s neither an accident nor a surprise that the National Rifle Association and ALEC have been close allies all along.

And ALEC, even more than other movement-conservative organizations, is clearly playing a long game. Its legislative templates aren’t just about generating immediate benefits to the organization’s corporate sponsors; they’re about creating a political climate that will favor even more corporation-friendly legislation in the future.

Did I mention that ALEC has played a key role in promoting bills that make it hard for the poor and ethnic minorities to vote?

Yet that’s not all; you have to think about the interests of the penal-industrial complex — prison operators, bail-bond companies and more. (The American Bail Coalition has publicly described ALEC as its “life preserver.”) This complex has a financial stake in anything that sends more people into the courts and the prisons, whether it’s exaggerated fear of racial minorities or Arizona’s draconian immigration law, a law that followed an ALEC template almost verbatim.

Think about that: we seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.

Now, ALEC isn’t single-handedly responsible for the corporatization of our political life; its influence is as much a symptom as a cause. But shining a light on ALEC and its supporters — a roster that includes many companies, from AT&T and Coca-Cola to UPS, that have so far managed to avoid being publicly associated with the hard-right agenda — is one good way to highlight what’s going on. And that kind of knowledge is what we need to start taking our country back.

Conservatives say they believe in individual rights. That's just so much propaganda - Mao would be proud of the way conservatives twist less liberty into more freedom. Conservatives and groups such as ALEC are turning the USA into a kind of corporate dystopia that is not hard to find in science fiction novels. People say it can't happen in the USA. It is happening. Not all at once. Just a little piece of crony corporatism here and a dash of conservative authoritarianism there. The Bush administration made unprecedented attacks on our freedoms and conservatives defended those attacks. That says a lot about the radical anti-American conservative agenda.

Reproductive Rights Are Civil Rights

Reproductive Rights Are Civil Rights

That requires that we look to history and the Constitution. I found myself doing that a few weeks back, sitting in the DC living room of Pamela Bridgewater, talking about slavery as the TV news followed the debate over whether the State of Virginia should force a woman to spread her legs and endure a plastic wand shoved into her vagina. Pamela has a lot of titles that, properly, ought to compel me to refer to her now as Professor Bridgewater—legal scholar, teacher at American University, reproductive rights activist, sex radical—but she is my friend and sister, and we were two women sitting around talking, so I shall alternate between the familiar and the formal.

“What a spectacle,” Pamela exclaimed, “Virginia, the birthplace of the slave breeding industry in America, is debating state-sanctioned rape. Imagine the woman who says No to this as a prerequisite for abortion. Will she be strapped down, her ankles shackled to stir-ups?”

“I suspect,” said I, “that partisans would say, ‘If she doesn’t agree, she is free to leave.’?”

“Right, which means she is coerced into childbearing or coerced into taking other measures to terminate her pregnancy, which may or may not be safe. Or she relents and says Yes, and that’s by coercion, too.”

“Scratch at modern life and there’s a little slave era just below the surface, so we’re right back to your argument.”

Pamela Bridgewater’s argument, expressed over the past several years in articles and forums, and at the heart of a book in final revision called Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom, presents the most compelling conceptual and constitutional frame I know for considering women’s bodily integrity and defending it from the right.

More at the link. In the crazed minds of conservatives a clump of cells and corporations are people entitled to full rights as citizens, while women are not.

Women Have Never Liked Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback(R) So Now He Is Getting Revenge By Making All Women Only Three-fifths of a Person

Women Have Never Liked Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback(R) So Now He Is Getting Revenge By Making All Women Only Three-fifths of a Person

Women posted on Facebook to target Gov. Sam Brownback's support of an anti-abortion bill.
In protest of the governor’s support for a far-reaching anti-abortion bill, Kansas women have taken to GOP Gov. Sam Brownback’s Facebook page to criticize his position. The postings mocked Brownback’s seemingly excessive interest in his neighbors’ reproductive and sexual health lives by addressing him as a women’s health expert:

    He’s vowed to sign into law the onerous “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” – a bill he freely admits that he has not read – that would permit doctors to withhold information from patients, force women to hear the fetal heartbeat prior to an abortion procedure, and contains the absolutely bananas provision that would require doctors to lie to women by telling them that abortions would increase the risk of breast cancer.

By Thursday, all of the comments from the “sarcasm bombing” had been scrubbed from Brownback’s Facebook wall, though RH Reality Check grabbed a couple of screenshots of the page:

Virginia Republicans faced similar backlash this week when residents of the state bombarded the Facebook pages of Republicans state Sen. Ryan McDougle — who sponsored the recently passed ultrasound bill — and Del. David Albo (R) with sarcastic posts “detailing anatomical happenings, asking questions and thanking Virginia Senate Republican caucus chairman Ryan McDougle for his concern of women’s health and rights.”

Will Gov Brownback be submitting urine samples every week so every American will know if he is taking Viagra. Will Kansas conservatives be setting up live video cams in their homes so the rest of America can watch and judge whether their personal sexual behavior is appropriate. Funny how much the world conservatives envision for the USA looks a lot like the old communists USSR.

How Do You Know If a Political Movement is Immoral - It Lies All The Time, Conservatives Invent $1 Abortion Myth

How Do You Know If a Political Movement is Immoral - It Lies All The Time, Conservatives Invent $1 Abortion Myth

Right-wing media are pointing to final regulations implementing health care reform legislation to revive long discredited myths about abortion coverage.

In early March 2012, the federal Department of Health and Human Services finalized a number of regulations implementing portions of the Affordable Care Act. One of the regulations implemented a provision requiring that insurance companies that choose to provide coverage for abortion through the health care exchanges ensure that federal money is not used to provide abortions. The regulations further require insurers to collect an additional abortion coverage fee from plan enrollees who choose a plan that covers abortion.

After the rules were announced, The Fox Nation excerpted a LifeNews.com piece under the false headline: "$1 Abortions in Obamacare." And Rush Limbaugh falsely claimed that the regulation "establishes state health care exchanges under Obamacare including an abortion premium mandate. You now, because of this implementation of the rule, you now will be forced to pay a dollar a month to cover abortion on your insurance policy." Limbaugh also claimed that the fee "is coming out of your pocket, one way or the other."

None of this is true. There are no "$1 abortions" in the Affordable Care Act. There are also no requirements that everyone pay a fee for abortion coverage; indeed, people always have the choice of picking a plan that doesn't cover abortion at all.

The Falsehood That Everyone "Will Be Forced To Pay A Dollar A Month To Cover Abortion On Your Insurance Policy"

Limbaugh's claim that "you now will be forced to pay a dollar a month to cover abortion on your insurance policy," is simply not true.

The reason that the surcharge for abortion coverage exists at all is to make sure that federal money is not spent on abortion. Federal law bans the use of any federal funds for abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or where the life of the woman is in danger. The Affordable Care Act maintains that ban. Plans that cover abortion must charge enrollees an additional fee for abortion and keep those funds separate to ensure that no federal money is paid for abortion.

Moreover, people do not even have to choose a plan that covers abortion. The Affordable Care Act specifically says that in any health care exchanges that are established, there must be "at least one ... plan that does not provide coverage" for abortions. Therefore, a person who receives insurance through the exchanges can choose either a plan that covers abortion or one that does not. If the person chooses a plan that does not cover abortion, he or she does not pay a surcharge for abortion. Again, the regulations do nothing to change this provision.

Right-Wing Invents "$1 Abortions"

With respect to the right-wing media's claim about the impact of the Affordable Care Act on how much abortions cost, the Affordable Care Act does not set a price for abortions. Section 1303 of the Affordable Care Act states that insurance plans can cover abortions in cases of rape and incest and in cases where the life of the pregnant woman is in danger.

If an insurance plan chooses to cover abortion in other situations as well, it must charge an additional fee for this coverage. The Health and Human Services secretary determines the cost of this fee based "an average actuarial basis" for the entire population covered. But the cost of this fee may not take into account any cost savings that result from abortions, such as those resulting from a decrease in "prenatal care, delivery, or postnatal care." No matter what the actuarial estimates are, the fee shall not be "less than $1 per enrollee, per month." The regulations do nothing to change this provision.

In other words, private insurance companies that choose to cover abortions must overestimate the costs of abortion (since they are not allowed to take into account any cost reductions that result from abortion coverage). If this overestimate turns out to be less than $1 per month per enrollee, insurers still must charge enrollees $1 per month.

Conservatism is like all of history's nightmarish political movements, they wrap themselves in patriotism and values, which they use like a Trojan horse, to force their anti-freedom, anti-women, anti-children, anti-rationalism, anti-science, anti-morality agenda on the general public.

Pennsylvania Conservatives Prop Up Big Business With Crony Corporate Welfare and Give Average Citizens The Shaft

Pennsylvania Conservatives Prop Up Big Business With Crony Corporate Welfare and Give Average Citizens The Shaft

Pennsylvania, where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were signed and where the U.S. coal, oil and nuclear industries began, has adopted what may be the most anti-democratic, anti-environmental law in the country, giving gas companies the right to drill anywhere, overturn local zoning laws, seize private property and muzzle physicians from disclosing specific health impacts from drilling fluids on patients.
The draconian new law, known as Act 13, revises the state’s oil and gas statutes, to allow oil companies to drill for natural gas using the controversial process known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking, where large volumes of water and toxic chemicals are pumped into vertical wells with lateral bores to shatter the rock and release the hydrocarbons. The law strips rights from communities and individuals while imposing new statewide drilling rules.

“It’s absolutely crushing of local self-government,” said Ben Price, project director for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which has helped a handful of local communities—including the city of Pittsburgh—adopt community rights ordinances that elevate the rights of nature and people to block the drilling. “The state has surrendered over 2,000 municipalities to the industry. It’s a complete capitulation of the rights of the people and their right to self-government. They are handing it over to the industry to let them govern us. It is the corporate state. That is how we look at it.”

“Now I know what it feels like to live in Nigeria,” said recently retired Pittsburgh City Council President Doug Shields. “You’re basically a resource colony for multi-national corporations to take your natural resources, take them back to wherever they are at, add value to them, and then sell them back to you.”

Needless to say, Pennsylvania’s top political leadership—Republican Gov. Tom Corbett and Republican-controlled legislature—see Act 13 as a pro-business, clean-energy bill creating jobs, revenue and improving environmental laws surrounding drilling. That the 174-page bill was essentially rammed through the legislature over objections from local officials, environmentalists and a handful of legislators who said it not only turned “300 years of local zoning upside down,” but exposed the state to liability from wells, was irrelevant.

Every day conservatives have a choice between what is best for America and what puts more money in their pockets. They always pick greed over morality. Every day conservatives deprive future generations of freedom, energy and good health. Conservatives call this evil process freedom and patriotism.. Conservatism is in no way about what is good for the nation, it is about the accumulation of money and power, conservatism is the Anti-American freedom and responsibility movement, the movement of drooling hypocrites.

Senior Romney Health Adviser Admits Obamacare Can Move Health Care System In The Right Direction

Senior Romney Health Adviser Admits Obamacare Can Move Health Care System In The Right Direction

Mike Leavitt, President George W. Bush’s former Secretary of Health and Human Services and a senior adviser to Mitt Romney, says the Affordable Care Act could help reduce health care costs and transform America’s existing fee-for-service health care model. In an apparent break from Romney’s pledge to “easily” repeal the law, Leavitt told ModernHealthcare that the measure could help move the nation in the right direction:

    Mike Leavitt, the former secretary of HHS under President George W. Bush and current Romney adviser, said the federal government’s historic $15 trillion debt will drive “hard” changes in healthcare system to reduce its costs. Those changes, including moving across healthcare from a fee-for-service model to outcomes based payment, may be facilitated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Romney has repeatedly urged repeal and replacement of the law.

    The law “gives the secretary authority to do certain things that are clearly aimed at trying to move us in this direction,” he said in a brief interview after addressing a Washington gathering of the Cancer Action Network. “A lot of it will depend on how aggressively the secretary chooses to use the authorities in the law to move us in that direction.”

Leavitt’s consulting firm, Leavitt Partners, is also heavily invested in the health law’s exchanges and “has been advising companies and state legislatures” on how to build the new marketplaces. He has also said that companies and states will likely implement the measure despite the GOP’s efforts to unravel the law, arguing that “they recognize that individual insurance shoppers and small businesses have long been at a disadvantage, lacking the negotiating power of large companies that can demand better prices.”

So Romney's advisory says that Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act is a step in the right direction - even as the far right conservatives like Sarah Palin and anti-American Fox News still claim ObamaCare is composed of "death panels".

Conservative Economics is Trickle on The American People Economics

Conservative Economics is Trickle on The American People Economics - “Trickled On” Economics

One thing about an election year, particularly this one, is that it reveals the fallacy that humanity has somehow emerged from “mere animal conditions.”  We may have comfortable homes, climate-control, exo-skeletons (known as automobiles) to allow us to move about rapidly and move objects many times our own weight, etc.  But beavers, ants, and foxes have these things.  One thing that humans have the capacity for, if they strive to use it, is being able to see life from another’s viewpoint – we have the capacity for compassion.  If anything would allow us to rise from a “mere animal condition,” it is this compassion.  But under the capitalist model, currently the dominant paradigm in the world, the priority is put on expropriating land and labor in order for a small group to accumulate wealth they did not produce.  In our deluded national narrative, these people are said to be “job creators.”  In fact, their access to wealth and power has allowed them to create a sort of neo-feudal system that can be aptly called, “Trickled-On Economics.”

In this dominant paradigm headed by Big Capital, compassion is highly discouraged.  There is a tendency among the politicians, managers, and overseers of capitalist institutions to live like there is no tomorrow and pretend like there was no yesterday.  After all, the working class – those who actually produce wealth – can be depended upon for a source of insurance in the event the gaming schemes of Big Capital fail.  This attitude of borrow now (“leverage” if you are rich), worry later, unlike the wealth itself, has trickled down, or should I say “trickled on” the general public.

The so-called “debt crisis” currently providing rationale for cutting social programs was created by capitalists manipulating the housing and financial markets for short-term profit, a scheme that crashed the global economy.  While they were doing that, working class people struggled with a steady decline in income resulting from off-shoring American manufacturing, union sell-outs, and outright union-busting.  To make up for this decline, they were handed credit cards, deregulated during the Reagan years, and usurious lending became the order of the day.  In addition, instead of providing education for its citizens as some social welfare states of western and northern Europe have done, the student loan industry was created, with student loan giant Sallie Mae becoming a for-profit corporation by 1995.  As if this was not enough (it never is), for-profit health care, starring Big Pharma, has become ensconced in Congress, K-Street, and Wall Street.  Also, moving in from the desert is a dust devil known as the for-profit prison system.  Examples of profiteering from others’ misfortune, or indeed manufacturing misfortune for profit, (note: I do not even broach the war profiteering game in this essay), has no limit in the capitalist paradigm.

With the declining share of wealth enjoyed by the working class, it was logically reasoned that higher education was a way out of mind-numbing, dead-end jobs and into a better life.   Both federally-insured and private loans for education skyrocketed.  For some, this better life came to pass, for others it became a trap and in some cases a death-trap.  Student loans do not have bankruptcy protection, and the collection agency can seize your home, your social security, your disability income – pretty much anything they want to seize.  There are numerous horror stories out there, including many suicides.  Indeed, as Alan Collinge has written in his book The Student Loan Scam, defaulted loans are more lucrative than those not in default because assets can be seized.

Credit card debt, which now ranks behind student loans in consumer debt as of the summer of 2010, is the result of falling wages and job loss.  By 2012, there were well over a half billion credit cards in use in the U.S. alone.  That is double the total population of the country.  Bankruptcies were down in 2011; with a mere 1.37 million filings in the U.S. (it was 1.55 in 2010).  Many bankruptcies were brought about by medical bills contracted in a system that preys on the sick.

A compassionate set of policies that would address these issues would not include taking billions of dollars in tax revenue from the working class and handing it over to Wall Street bankers to cover their failed schemes and scams as has been done more than once since 2008.  In this paradigm of the Bean-counter, we can hand $700 billion at a pop over to criminals in suits, but we cannot help struggling college graduates or families stranded without gainful employment.

It is not hard to see that the issue is systemic.  Capitalism has no built-in moral code other than maximizing profits.  Whatever morality exists is brought to the table by individuals, but the system itself does not reward compassion; indeed, ruthlessness and cruelty are central features of the game.  Capital has been engaged in a long-term struggle to deprive people of access to the resources they need to build a good life for themselves.  It creates an environment that allows a small group or even one person to live extremely well on the backs of those whose access to resources they control.  Once people become separated from the resources that they need to live, they must re-acquire them on terms favorable to the capitalist.  In some cases, the result is modern-day slavery.  The separation of people from the resource base is a central theme in the human history of the world and at the heart of our systemic problem today.

This system has led to the abuse of the non-human resources, as well.  Humans and their resources are, ultimately, not separate at all.  Labor is the interaction of humans with the non-human world and the results are often very beautiful, profound, poignant, moving, powerful, and on and on – in a word: art.  Forcing human beings to interact with resources on terms favorable to the Capitalist is hardly emerging from “mere animal conditions.”  It results in environmental degradation of both human and non-human.  Degrading and dangerous sweatshops, mines, oil rigs, etc., have increased because of deregulation and defunding of safety oversight.  Environmental oversight has been rolled back, defunded, or ignored.  These underscore the systemic nature of the dual expropriation of labor and resources for the sake of the wealth accumulation of a very few.

From mountain-top mining to clear-cutting rainforests, the systemic unsustainable use of resources creates an oppositional relationship between humans and their environment.  “Man vs. Nature” is a conflict drilled into our heads from an early age, but it is this term “Versus” that needs to be questioned and studied.  A political economic system in which compassion features predominately would institutionalize such introspection.  We have examples from our past.  Agriculture, for instance, traditionally employed the concept of “husbandry.”  Farms were once places where abundance was possible for all species involved and sustaining this human and non-human natural order was the priority. Under capitalism, agriculture has industrialized and cold, hard numbers dominate decision-making processes.

Under a more humane system, labor would be an extension of the production of nature; indeed, human labor is an expression of nature.  But its usurpation by a few is like the felling of the forests, the leveling of mountains, the making of war, or the building of sweatshops: we trade our humanity – our compassion – for the sake of accumulation by an ambitious and even sociopathic few.  If we are serious about emerging from a “mere animal condition,” we need to “think outside the box,” and box is the capitalist paradigm.


Doug Harvey is a historian and musician teaching, writing, and performing in the Kansas City area.

Doug means well, but he underestimates  -so all, but so much of the American public's appetite for abuse. Changing from the crony vulture capitalism we have now to a humanistic capitalism is immediately demonized as creeping communism. Until more of the public gets tired of being trickled on we are doomed to repeat these economic collapses -large and small forever - like rats on a treadmill.

Anti-American Conservative Legislators Are Trying to Turn Back The Clock To 1850 for American Women

How Lawmakers Lost Their Sense Of Shame

Connie Johnson is not afraid to be outrageous. The Democratic state senator from Oklahoma has watched in frustration for several years now as colleagues have rammed through bills limiting women's reproductive rights.

She tried debating and making speeches. Finally, earlier this month, she thought of something that made her point more clearly, or at least more graphically.

She introduced an amendment that would define life as beginning not at conception, but at "ejaculation."

"It wasn't until I got graphic that people finally heard what I was saying," Johnson says. "It was wonderful. If this is what it took to draw attention — to draw the world's attention to Oklahoma — I'm willing to do it."

Other legislators have used similarly provocative means to underline their point that bills addressing reproduction seem to be targeting women unfairly.

The Virginia Senate, for instance, last month rejected by two votes a measure, offered by Democrat Janet Howell, that would have required men to undergo a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before they could be prescribed drugs for erectile dysfunction. Howell's measure may have been a stunt, but it was also intended as a serious comment on the underlying measure being debated, which would have required women to undergo an intravaginal ultrasound exam prior to an abortion.

These bills themselves are part of a larger trend. Politicians have always thrived on attention. In the age of reality shows and instant hype through Twitter and cable coverage, however, it appears there are no longer any limits on what they are willing to say or do.

"There's always been an element of grandstanding in the legislative process," says Jack Pitney, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College. "If you're eager for attention, the new electronic environment makes it easier for such activities to get attention."

The New Media Environment

Politicians have always said things that are shocking. But now titillating words and deliberately agitating bills can resonate well beyond their states or the halls of Congress as they're picked up instantly by blogs and cable.

This week, Indiana state Rep. Bob Morris gained instant national notoriety with his argument that the Girl Scouts subvert "traditional American family values."

Morris has stuck to his guns, but other politicians caught up in a trap of their own words' making have ended up apologizing. Some may have originally meant what they said — but they perhaps never intended their words to travel so far, so fast.

That was obviously the case for Rep. John Sullivan, R-Okla., who complained at a Bixby town hall meeting on Wednesday that there was no way to get senators to pass the House version of the federal budget "other than me going over there with a gun and holding it to their head and maybe killing a couple of them."

Sullivan illustrated his remarks with a firearms gesture, but he quickly apologized when he was called on them by a national news organization, the liberal blog Talking Points Memo.

There used to be a saying - America Love It or Leave It- Maybe its time for conservatives to start loving American freedom and respecting the basic rights of citizens or go found their own backwards country.

Conservative Republicans have made it clear the goal of the new culture war is preventing women from controlling their own lives

Conservative Republicans have made it clear the goal of the new culture war is preventing women from controlling their own lives

Why did the audience groan when John King asked in last night’s CNN debate whether the Republican candidates believe in contraception? It probably wasn’t because it was an asinine formulation (“Since birth control is the latest hot topic, which candidate believes in birth control, and if not, why?” as if birth control were a unicorn). It’s likely because the audience seems to have realized that it’s not a good look for Republicans to be so obviously engaged in curtailing women’s rights — which is why the candidates, or at least Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, started talking about “out of wedlock” births. And though linking births outside marriage to contraception may have seemed like a non-sequitur, it wasn’t.

Santorum said, “What we’re seeing is a problem in our culture with respect to children being raised by children, children being raised out of wedlock, and the impact on society economically, the impact on society with respect to drug use and all — a host of other things when children have children.” And Romney, having started with a by-now-half-hearted defense of “religion freedom,” jumped in eagerly to defend abstinence-only education and say, “We have to have a president who’s willing to say that the best opportunity an individual can give to their unborn child is an opportunity to be born in a home with a mother and a father.” Bonus points for raising the spectre of abortion when asked about contraception. (By comparison, Ron Paul sounded halfway sane when he said immorality, not birth control pills, kills families. Or something.)

You might wonder if contraception isn’t logically a way to reduce potential unwanted pregnancies. But this subject change is one that some social conservatives have been trying to push for awhile. It involves conflating teen pregnancy and adults choosing not to marry when they become parents, and low-income women’s access to contraception with their “failure” to marry. (And drug use, why not?) But most crucially, it involves a nostalgia for the days where women neither had a choice over when they got pregnant nor had much of a choice but to try and marry the father.

Santorum even doubled down on the suggestion that more access to contraception leads to an increased “breakdown of the family,” citing to Greta van Susteren, again, the New York Times story about the high rate of children born outside of marriage. Then teen pregnancy got thrown in, with Van Susteren asking, “Are you saying that with contraception there’s more sexual activity? That young people will be less sexually active without contraception?” Santorum replied, ”That certainly was the case in the past.”

Inconveniently, teen pregnancy is at a 40-year low, so you might wonder which past Santorum is longing for. It’s true that between 1971 and 1988, more teenagers were having sex than before, but according to public health researchers, “At the beginning of the 1990s this trend reversed.” The data also indicates that it’s not an accident, so to speak, that the U.S. still has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the world: ”A mid-1990s analysis of five developed countries showed that adolescents in the United States initiated sexual activity at an age similar to that of adolescents in Sweden, France, Canada and Great Britain but that they used contraceptives less frequently.” A 2007 study in the American Journal of Public Health concluded that between 1995 and 2002, “the decline in pregnancy risk among 18- and 19-year-olds was entirely attributable to increased contraceptive use. Decreased sexual activity was responsible for about one quarter (23 percent) of the decline among 15- to 17-year-olds, and increased contraceptive use was responsible for the remainder (77 percent).”

As for the number of adults engaging in sexual activity outside marriage, it’s also been pointed out that the trend of later marriage — which also happens to correlate to a more lasting one — is on a “collision course” with abstinence-until-marriage doctrine. (Rick Santorum may have eight children, but he married at 32, for what that data point is worth). That Times piece about how more than half of births to women under 30 are outside of marriage (though a majority of women across the age spectrum are married when they have children) summed up the debate as follows:

    “The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage.”

Birth control, of course, is used as a stand-in for the sexual revolution, but the suggestion is that without the pill, women might have been better able to coerce men into marriage in exchange for sex, whether those men are equipped to be partners and parents or not. Now, of course, they no longer need to solely rely on a man to support themselves (although two-partner households can certainly enjoy major economic advantages). How many women who lived through that earlier, more limited set of options would wish it on their daughters and granddaughters, as Santorum and apparently Romney do?

Conservatives also have suggested that the lure of no-strings-attached sex may have tricked women, too, into giving the milk away for free and saddled them with a baby or an abortion instead. “It is possible that women who are more confident in the reliability of their contraceptives may engage in sexual activity more often,” speculated National Review contributor Michael J. New last year in seeking to explain why the abortion rate had risen for low-income women while it had dramatically dropped among more affluent women. The implication was that Planned Parenthood handing out pills to sluts had encouraged them to wildly have sex, get pregnant and hightail it to an abortion clinic. Wealthier women, who are more likely to be married, did… what, exactly? Abstained? In fact, married couples report having sex more often than either single or partnered people, and according to census data, 78 percent of them use contraception. (There are still a million unplanned pregnancies that occur within marriage, and almost four in 10 of them end in abortion.) Meanwhile, contraceptive use among unmarried women overall is up, from 80 percent in 1982 to 86 percent in 2002.

As I wrote earlier this week, the evidence suggests that the key to reducing unplanned pregnancies, within and outside of marriage, is not less contraception — it’s more and better contraception, made more accessible alongside better information, all of which happens to correlate to your class situation. The substantive part of this “do you believe in birth control” nonsense is that the Obama administration has taken solid steps to correct the financial disparities in birth control access, by mandating that insurers fully cover it. And the fact that reproductive rights, when fully exercised, ultimately help women make choices for their own lives — whether to have children, whom to have them with and when — rather than making biology their inexorable destiny is what really rankles these Republican men.

Anyone listening to Santorum in particular knows that he is very quick with the comparisons to Hilter of anything he simply disagrees with. In that vain, throughout history it has been the general goal of all the great despots to oppose full person-hood and rights for women. So if Ricky really wants to learn about what is authoritarian and what is not, he need only look in the mirror.

Conservative Libertarian plantation owners don't want labor to get too uppity - David Koch Admits Big Spending to Help Scott Walker Bust 'Union Power'

Conservative Libertarian plantation owners don't want labor to get too uppity -David Koch Admits Big Spending to Help Scott Walker Bust 'Union Power'

Billionaire campaign donor David Koch, heir to a fortune and a political legacy created by one of the driving forces behind the John Birch Society, makes no secret of his enthusiasm for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

“What Scott Walker is doing with the public unions in Wisconsin is critically important. He’s an impressive guy and he’s very courageous,” Koch explained in a recent conversation reported by the Palm Beach Post. “If the unions win the recall, there will be no stopping union power.”

That’s no surprise. What is surprising is that Koch is now appears to be bragging about how he and his brother Charles are using their vast fortune to fund an independent campaign aimed at “helping” Walker. Even in an era when billionaires such as the Kochs are emerging as key financiers of Super PACS and other campaigning vehicles Koch’s admission will raise eyebrows—and questions about whether inappropriate coordination of by a candidate, his campaign and a supposedly independent group might be the stuff of “scandal.”

Like their father before them, David Koch and his brother Charles are longtime champions of extreme right-wing causes. And Walker’s militant anti-labor policies coupled with a willingness to cut funding for public education and public services have made him a hero of conservative hardliners like the Kochs. At the same time, Walker’s extremism has inspired a movement to recall him from office, which recently filed petitions with more than 1 million signatures calling for an election to remove the governor.

The governor has already spent a fortune trying to block the recall drive, with millions of dollars in television advertising, as well as expensive legal efforts to block a new vote. Both have been strikingly unsuccessful so far; at least in part because Wisconsin has steadily lost jobs since Walker’s budget was enacted—a dismal record that has caused a loss of confidence in the governor and his agenda.

Even as Walker struggles to explain why Wisconsin is shedding jobs while the rest of the country is gaining them, conservative groups funded by Charles and David Koch, such as Americans for Prosperity, are filling the state’s television airwaves with ads that claim Walker’s policies are “working.” According to Reuters, “a $700,000 advertising campaign sponsored by Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a foundation funded by conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch of oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries, hit the Wisconsin airwaves, the latest phase of its ‘Stand with Walker’ campaign.”

These ads are supposedly independent expenditures by a not-for-profit organization that operates under tax rules established to benefit the work of “Religious, Educational, Charitable, Scientific, Literary, Testing for Public Safety, to Foster National or International Amateur Sports Competition, or Prevention of Cruelty to Children or Animals Organizations.”

Coordination between candidates and their campaigns and “independent” groups operating under the Internal Revenue Service code as 501(c)3 operations.

The IRS is explicit in this regard: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes.”

Similar, though slightly less strict rules, apply to campaigning by other co-called “501” groups that the Koch’s have funded.

So, while David Koch’s stated enthusiasm for Scott Walker was not surprising, his explanation of how that enthusiasm is being expressed politically was.

According to the Post, Koch said of Walker: “We’re helping him, as we should. We’ve gotten pretty good at this over the years. We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.”

The Post added: “By ‘we’ he says he means Americans for Prosperity, which is spending about $700,000 on an ‘It’s working’ television ad buy in the state.”

Governor Walker’s defenders, a group that now officially includes the Koch Brothers (thanks to David Koch’s pronouncement), will surely suggest that the billionaire is merely expressing his right to fund independent activities that just happen to be “helping” Walker.

But it is notable that, during last summer’s Wisconsin state Senate recall campaigns, the Republican Party of Wisconsin issued statements pointing out that “coordination between…political campaigns and independent groups is specifically outlawed.”

Such coordination might be denied by the parties involved. But, argued the Republicans, reasonable people should recognize coordination as a “scandal.”

In some ways America is still fighting the Civil War and this time, unless ordinary working Americans speak up, the plantation owners like the Koch brothers will win. They hate that ordinary people - firefighters, office workers, nurses or anyone should have any power or say over their working conditions or even their fate in life. One thing these conservative libertarians are not about is freedom - except for the freedom to tyrannize the working class.